In The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, Matt Watkinson provides a very practical guide to customer experience design and management, backed with a range of examples from different industries (mostly UK based). I particularly like the way that the author focuses on the ‘qualitative’ aspects of experience, including the sensory and psychological elements, arguing that these cannot be measured quantitatively through standard metrics. As he puts it, “it’s not what the features and functions of the product or service allow us to do, it’s how it makes us feel”. He also focuses on ‘individuals’ rather than ‘customers’ as many significant experiences with a business are likely to happen before someone is a customer. Read more »
Researchers can unobtrusively collect information using fly-on-the-wall observation, where there is no direct participation or interference with the people or behaviours that are being observed. This is a different approach to other types of observation (eg participant observation), intentionally avoiding direct involvement and therefore minimising the biases and influences that such involvement brings. However, the inability to connect with those observed or to probe behaviours and motivations can limit this approach.This makes such observation relatively less structured and more flexible than other approaches, although often guided by frameworks such as AEIOU which will be described in another article). Read more »
If you want to get to the heart of a customer’s relationship with a brand experience, asking them to write a personal letter can often reveal deep insights about what they value and expect from even the most everyday objects and interactions. Read more »
[This is an edited version of a talk for IAA Singapore and 4As on 26th September 2012]
Advertising can learn much from the latest understanding of the brain just as market research can (read more here). Although there is much to learn, here are three important lessons:
- relevant context
- emotional meaning
- repeat repeat repeat (but not in the way you might think) Read more »
“An illusion, however convincing, is still an illusion.” – Philip K. Dick (paraphrased)
Watching an old movie of yourself or looking at an old picture, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine the person you see in the frame. You recognise the image, and perhaps can recall something about the occasion, but (for me if I am honest) it can often be difficult to fully identify with the person you see. Identity changes over time, and although you look at a picture and know that it is you, you also know that that version of ‘you’ is different to the version of you that is looking at the image and contemplating who is there. Read more »
Easy user experiences
Mapping is the term used to describe the relationship between controls and their movements or effects, and good mapping is an important part of making the user experience easy and enjoyable. For example, the Segway human transporter goes forward when the user leans forward and back when the user leans back. A great use of mapping. Read more »
Making more sense of brand experiences
A recent post on Making Sense of Brand Design (link here) shares some great examples of creating sensory signatures to create short term impact and long term brand identity, and recent reading (see references) has revealed more ways in which the senses can be leveraged to create great brand experiences.
The most interesting overall finding revealed in Helmut Leder’s Scientific American article is that in the short term how a product or experience looks is very important to its appeal, but after a month of use how it feels comes to be much more important than how it looks. It’s great to wear a really fancy pair of shoes for the first time, but we won’t wear them very often unless they are really comfortable on our feet. Read more »
The brain science of marketing
In his recent book Brainfluence, Roger Dooley shares 100 tricks for persuading and convincing consumers based on a wide range of evidence from neuromarketing and many other fields such as psychology and behavioural economics. The examples are well documented and overall this is a much more practical, structured and sound guide to brain science of marketing than many other books (including notably Buyology which is less structured and poorly documented). Read more »
“A few years ago it was simpler. Designers just designed things: objects like lamps, chairs, computer mice, cars, buildings, signage, page and screen layouts. Of course, we knew that the things we designed affected people’s experience. But still, it was enough to design the thing.” - Fulton Suri
Design and everyday life
Great design is able to serve our needs and, more importantly, give meaning to our lives. It adds value to products by manipulating both subconscious emotional cues and also tactile and material factors to create an emotional bond. Our bodies and most especially our hands, have amazing capabilities already built into them to enable us to interact with and manipulate the world to achieve our goals, and good design ‘amplifies’ those capabilities, empowering us to do more with the abilities we already have. Read more »
We’re only human
Anthropomorphism is a strong tendency for all of us to find forms that appear human-like to exhibit human characteristics more appealing. We tend to attribute such characteristics to animals, non-living objects, material states and abstract concepts (including organisations, spirits and deities, and the term anthropomorphism was coined in the mid 1700s to describe this behaviour. Such behaviour extends to animals, plants, forces of nature (wind, rain, sun) and we all tend to depict these as creatures with human motivations and characteristics. Such behaviour is very common in the arts and storytelling and mythology. Read more »
